Broadridge Financial Services, J.P. Morgan, Northern Trust and Banco Santander have completed a blockchain pilot which aimed to enhance global proxy vote transparency and analytics. This was run in support of a corporate issuer’s annual general meeting (AGM) and included participation of Santander Investment, the issuer’s agent. The pilot was run in parallel of the AGM, with the blockchain being utilised to produce a “shadow” digital register of the proxy voting taking place in the traditional model.

“Corporate governance is a key focus for our custody clients and we are pleased to collaborate with Broadridge on this important initiative,’’ says Justin Chapman, Global Head of Market Advocacy & Innovation Research at Northern Trust. ‘’Providing end-to-end vote transparency using blockchain as an enabler has the potential to significantly improve the proxy voting process.”

Julio Faura, head of the Blockchain Lab at Banco Santander, comments: “After piloting this blockchain-based platform with Broadridge, we see that proxy voting makes an interesting case where distributed ledgers and smart contracts can add transparency and efficiency to financial services, to the benefit of our corporate and institutional clients.”